Bidding and price negotiating e-commerce systems are well known. The Priceline.com system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207 entitled “Method and Apparatus for a Cryptographically Assisted commercial Network System Designed to Facilitate Buyer-driven Conditional Purchase Offers” to Walker et al. is an on-line bidding process in which a buyer specifies the price he or she desires to pay for an item, such as an airplane reservation or an automobile. The buyer's bid is submitted over the Internet to a central site which analyzes a database of sellers for that type of item to find one or more sellers currently selling the item at close to the bid price. The bidding process is always open to other buyers. Matches or near-matches are presented to the buyers after a time period that is generally associated with identifying a seller, where the buyer can then select from the seller and place a conditional purchase offer price. If the seller accepts the buyer's offer price, the sale is made. If the seller accepts the buyer's offer price, the buyer does not have the ability to offer a lower price, and is contractually obligated to purchase the item.
The Priceline' system like other known on-line bidding and price negotiating systems involve a plurality of buyers and a typically also a plurality of sellers at any given time for each item or service, and thus lacks privacy and exclusivity between the buyer and the seller. Such known on-line bidding and price negotiating systems also are generally not real-time, nor are they interactive.